


be my mirror, my sword and shield

by ginnyweasleys



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Fighting As Foreplay, Hatesex, Movie Spoilers, Post-Ragnarok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 16:51:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12657549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginnyweasleys/pseuds/ginnyweasleys
Summary: Loki’s face goes an interesting shade of red and he stalks closer, wine glass clenched in his hands. She waits, looking up at him, curious despite herself to see what he would do next.What he does is say: “I want a rematch.”





	be my mirror, my sword and shield

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for thor: ragnarok. shameless smut with a lot of build-up because these two won't shut up. and shameless use of coldplay lyrics but you know what, if the shoe fits...

**be my mirror, my sword and shield**

it was a wicked and wild wind  
blew down the doors to let me in  
shattered windows and the sound of drums  
people couldn’t believe what i’d become

―- _coldplay, viva la vida_

.

She has spent so long, so very, very long being resentful and bitter towards Asgard and its throne and everyone who ever called themselves a royal, that it strikes her with dull surprise to learn that at least one of the princes is actually worthy of her ire.

Thor – who is, for all his faults, someone good and kind and brave, a king worthy of putting on her armor and going to war for – sets them all up on Earth, pulling quite a few strings to basically assimilate all their people onto this tiny little backwater planet that he loves so much.

Loki, of course, gets extra security in his apartment.

“He did kill a lot of people,” Thor admits to her. “Few years back, tried to take over the whole planet, that sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing,” Valkyrie agrees, tipping a shot of beer down her throat. It burns and tastes curdled; everything on Earth is awful to her palette. “Why not let their justice system have him?”

“Don’t think I haven’t considered it.” Thor takes a swig of the bottle himself, and seems to handle it with much more grace. She supposes he’s had more practice. “But he is still my brother. And he came back for us.”

“He was going to betray you.”

Thor waves a hand. “He always does that.”

 

 

 

“So, this is where the god of mischief lives now.”

She says it like it’s something pathetic, but in all honesty, Thor had gone out for his brother – the apartment is spacious, decorated in Loki’s favorite shade of green, and full of books that have titles in multiple different languages. The only thing she can think he might complain about are the spells etched onto the doorway and the balcony by a certain Doctor Strange to prevent him from escaping.

He scowls. “Here to make sure I haven’t disappeared?”

Valkyrie throws one of her blades at him. He catches it by the hilt—barely—and looks reproachfully at her before dropping it.

“Just making sure.” She turns in a circle to complete her survey of his living quarters. Hers are better, closer to civilization and painted in shades of white and blue. Loki’s colors make her feel on edge, itching under her skin. It does not do to forget what it is that he does.

“Don’t you have better things to do?” Loki adds a sneer to his voice that seems more rehearsed than real. “Like drink yourself to death?”

“What, you don’t have alcohol?” Valkyrie frowns at him and goes to examine the kitchen. One of the cabinets is stocked with a decent amount of wine bottles. “You are so predictable.”

“It’s the least abominable of Earth alcohols,” he sniffs.

“I don’t think that’s true.” She pulls one bottle out and pops the cork, taking a sniff. It’s fruity and earthy, but still smells wrong, like someone had taken real alcohol and filtered it through a pool of fish.

“My brother brings his own food when he comes in to,” and here his voice acquires a distinct scorn to it, “ _check up_ on me. You might consider doing the same, rather than stealing my stash. I can’t exactly go out to buy more, you know.”

“Poor little prince.” Valkyrie waves the bottle of wine at him and watches with relish as his scowl deepens. “Stuck all alone on this tiny little planet he tried to take over.”

Loki’s lips thin. “He told you about that?” Clearly, his attempted takeover was not a source of pride for him, although from what she’d been told, he had been very nearly successful.

“Hulk did.” She grins at how he goes even paler than normal. “He loves that story.”

“He would.” Loki turns away as she finds herself a glass—although she could drink straight from the bottle, she’s not actually in the mood to drown her sorrows in Earth alcohol—and pours herself some wine.

“You don’t want any?” she asks the curve of his back, as he hunches over a book on his coffee table. The twilight outside strikes him at sharp angles, turning his silhouette into something silver and gleaming.

“Fine.” He sounds bored, so she debates going back on her offer. “The white, if you would.”

Valkyrie rolls her eyes, but opens a bottle of white wine and pours him a glass, too. It’s not like he can do anything to her in here, the spells and wards bind his magic so he only has his physical strength, of which she can easily best, so it won’t hurt to be nice, just this once.

And, sometimes, drinking with a partner is better than drinking alone. She’s learned that much, since they came to Earth.

“What are you working on?” she asks, not out of curiosity, but boredom, as she hands him his glass. Loki closes the book and drops it carelessly back on the table before accepting the glass, not offering any thanks, and swallowing a gulp.

“It might have escaped your notice, but Earth is about to be under attack—again.”

“Ah, so you are here, alone, trying to find a way to save this little planet that you hate so that you might be crowned their savior and king?”

Loki huffs. “Am I not allowed to reform my ways? I _did_ come back to save Asgard.”

“Because you value praise and enjoy holding your feigned superiority over other people’s heads,” she shoots back. “Most especially your brother’s.”

“Are you suggesting I value my brother’s praise, or my ability to be superior to him?”

“Both, and his good opinion,” she says simply, and swallows half her glass in one go as he looks at her in outrage. “That’s why you betray him so much, isn’t it? You think you can’t win him over, so you pretend you never wanted to, and let him believe the same.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Loki says, a dangerous edge to his voice. The wine makes her more brazen, makes her think she does.

“Just because _you_ can steal memories doesn’t mean you’re the only person who’s good at reading others.”

“Oh, I see.” His cool, unaffected smirk is back, and just the sight of it raises her hackles. “You’re still mad about our fight.”

“I would hardly call it a fight.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder matches his smirk with her own, cockiness for cockiness. “I kicked your ass.”

“And yet.” Loki takes two steps closer and suddenly he’s towering over her. His eyes gleam. “Here we are.”

Something spins inside her, unraveling, and then she presses her hand to his chest, hard, so he stumbles backwards, and she turns away. She’s rarely in the mood for mind games, particularly Loki’s—it’s easier to just beat him up and tie him up, in her experience—and especially not with a glass of wine in her system.

Odd, she’d thought Earth alcohol would take longer to work itself into her, but she already feels warm and buzzing. Maybe it was just their disgusting beer that didn’t affect her like this.

She goes for the bottle again, left on the kitchen counter. Old habits die hard, and she’d promised Thor she’d keep him company for an hour. That was as much as she’d thought she could give; he worried that his brother might go crazy without it. She’d bitten back a retort about how Loki was already fairly crazy, but thought Thor might not appreciate it.

When she looks back at him, Loki is studying a painting mounted on the wall, pretending nothing even slightly out of the ordinary had just happened.

Maybe it hadn’t.

She pours herself a glass of the wine he’d chosen, the white, and finds it slightly more to her taste. He finishes off his own glass and turns to look at her again.

“I should have said,” he says quietly, gesturing with one hand. “Back then. I am sorry… for what happened to you.”

“Oh.” She snorts and takes another gulp of wine. “Not for what you did?”

“No, that was entirely necessary,” Loki says breezily, his condolences dissipating on his tongue as quickly as they’d come. Valkyrie rolls her eyes, grabs the wine bottle by its neck, and marches over to refill his glass. Perhaps he’s better handled when he’s drunk.

(Thor had said: “Be careful. He’s a trickster.”

Valkyrie had set down her beer and met his open, honest blue eyes. “I can handle tricksters.”

Perhaps she had lied.)

He doesn’t protest more wine, only smirks at her over the top of his glass. “It was really a very terrible memory. Don’t think I couldn’t feel it.”

“Your fault you were burdened with it,” she reminds him. “I could have told you just as easily.”

“And what would you have told me, pray tell?”

Valkyrie is the one who steps closer this time. She pushes herself up to look him in the eye and bares her teeth, letting the memories she’d repressed so long spill out into her expression. Whatever he sees in there, Loki’s eyes flash with the tiniest bit of alarm.

“I would have told you that you’re a spoiled little prince who cannot _fathom_ the depths his people have gone to in order to protect his family,” she snarls. “I would have told you that you’re too caught up in all the ways you think your brother and your father have slighted you that you can’t see all the people who died for you to grow up comfortable and happy.”

“Who told you I grew up happy?” he demands.

She rolls her eyes. “ _You_ did. Look at you—you walk like a prince, you talk like a king. You may have suffered—most of it due to your own temperance, I’d wager—but you knew love. You gave it up for your ambitions, but you knew it.”

“I had no ambitions except to be seen as worthy,” Loki snaps, his voice low and sharp and molded to his anger. “You don’t understand—you were a _Valkyrie_ , you were always worthy—”

“Not always.” At that, he goes quiet. “I _made_ myself worthy. What have you made yourself?”

Loki stays silent, running his tongue over his lips. She thinks to mirror the movement, her throat feeling dry from all this _talking_ , but stops herself in time.

“You don’t know anything about me,” he says finally, softly.

“I suppose not,” she agrees, a trace of sarcasm in her voice. “You were barely a boy when I left.”

There’s a pause as he looks at her, gaze green and thoughtful and judgmental all at once. She doesn’t like that look, but she would like it less if she were sober. Loki leans closer, his breath smelling of wine and magic. He always smells of magic—ancient, twisty, frosty thing that it is. It gets under her skin and chills her bones, fighting the warmth of the alcohol.

“My brother,” he says, voice shaking with a distant fury, “had _everything_ —”

“And you had him,” she shoots back. He stares at her, eyes widening. “Tell me, Loki—what would you do if he died?”

“What?”

The way his fingers shake on his glass, she thinks she may have finally gotten under his skin the way he does her.

“What would you do if Thor died?” she repeats, each word slow and measured. “Who would you be without him?”

She can tell what he wants to say: _I would be king, I would be lord, I would be worshipped_ , but he’s come far enough to bite down on those words. They’re not true, and even if they were, she wouldn’t believe him. His hurt goes deeper than a crown, the same as hers.

“I lost all my sisters,” she tells him, and breaks their gaze because she can’t have him staring at her that way when she’s thinking of the Valkyries. “Sisters and lovers, everyone I ever called family. And you saw what I became without them.”

_Trash. Booze head. Scrapper 142. Traitor and coward._

Loki lifts one eyebrow. “Are you suggesting you and I are the same?”

“Not even a little.” She takes another sip of wine, close to the end of this glass, and rolls her eyes at him. “You still have your brother, don’t you? He cares about you, more than he should, enough to protect you from the rest of this planet.”

“Funny,” he remarks, voice dry in a way that means he’s deflecting. “I’d thought the rest of the planet was being protected from _me_.”

“You flatter yourself.”

A long beat of silence, and then he says, through half-gritted teeth, “You’re right.”

Valkyrie tilts her head. “Pardon?”

Again, through even more gritted teeth, “You’re _right_.”

The shock of winning such a confession from him almost distracts her from noticing all the ways his face shifts, his wounded ego warring with his tipsy truths. His brows furrow, lips pinching, and then he continues.

“I came because I couldn’t let him die. I’m here because he won’t let me die.” Loki glances away from her, then lifts the wine glass to his mouth and swallows all the rest of it in one go. “I know that he is still my brother, no matter… no matter what I do.”

Valkyrie studies him carefully, then smiles, plucks his empty glass from his hands, and steps back, ponytail swinging. “Good.”

“Wh—what?” Loki’s puzzlement is clear in his voice even as she turns away from him to set his glass and the bottle down on the counter. “What do you mean _good_?”

She doesn’t say anything, but allows herself to laugh into her own glass, not quite finished with the wine, and waits for him to puff himself up with anger.

“Did you come here just to hear me say—” Loki begins, sharp and annoyed and maybe a little embarrassed.

“No, your loving brother sent me here to get you to admit that,” she tells him, turning around and mock-toasting the air with her glass. “He wanted to be sure you didn’t have any new tricks up your sleeve, that maybe you had _learned_ something.”

Loki’s mouth twists down. “He could have just come down here _himself_ —”

“He’s rather clever when he wants to be.” Valkyrie sets her glass down, fills his halfway, and offers it back to him. He snatches it from her, irritated, and she waits until he’s started sipping it to add: “He’d thought you might suspect _him_ of trying to get you drunk, but not me.”

Loki splutters. “What—you—”

“Quite an ingenious plan, maybe even worthy of the trickster god himself,” she continues, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “He could have sent any of his friends, the Avengers, even Hulk, but he thought I would be best suited for it. He mentioned that you and him both used to _idolize_ the Valkyries, wanted to be one of us—”

She’s stretching the truth a little, but not by much. Loki’s face goes an interesting shade of red and he stalks closer, wine glass clenched in his hands. She waits, looking up at him, curious despite herself to see what he would do next.

What he does is say: “I want a rematch.”

Valkyrie blinks. “You want a what?”

“A rematch.” He sets the wine glass, still mostly full, back on the counter behind her. “You got the better of me in Sakaar, and… Thor was right. We did idolize the Valkyries.”

Loki’s gaze rakes over her, and she feels unsettled in her skin, even through the layers of leather. Like he can see right through her, past every lie and sin and moment of weakness. His lips curl in a smirk and he opens his palm so she can see one of his twin daggers gleaming silver against his pale skin. A gauntlet.

“So you want to take one down?”

“Just you,” he says, his eyes gleaming with—desire, almost. “Best of one. No tricks, no stakes. Only bragging rights.”

“Fine.” She reaches over and plucks the dagger from his palm. He frowns at her as she tosses it over her shoulder and embeds it in the wall of the kitchen. “Forget the weapons, then. I wouldn’t want to make the little prince bleed.”

“I’m not so little,” he murmurs, and he’s right in one aspect—he towers above her, a looming shadow, but without that edge of danger to his gaze, he looks less evil, less the god of mischief than he had on Sakaar. He’s close enough that she can see the ring of green of his pupil, the pink of his lips, the white of his throat. All his colors muted in the soft light of the setting sun just beyond his balcony.

She inclines her head and he takes three steps back, proper dueling form, and lifts his hands in a fighting stance. She mirrors him and bends her knees, ready to strike, but first, he paces, stalking around her in a circle like a cat.

For a minute, she wishes she had her white armor, but her brown leathers will have to do. Loki isn’t wearing any armor, either, only his black and green Asgardian clothes, so she figures it’s fair. He feigns a step towards her, doesn’t actually lunge, and she jumps for him.

Her fist impacts on his chest, but she thinks he might have let her get that blow, because it barely sways him. In the next moment, he grabs her arm and twists it, and she’d be lost if she hadn’t dug her other hand into his shoulder and brought her knee up to kick him.

“Ouch,” he mutters, but there’s a savage grin on his face even as he stumbles back from her. “Don’t hold back.”

“I would never,” she says, and aims another punch at him. He dodges it, drops low, and kicks his foot out to trip her; she’s just drunk enough that it almost works but still strongminded enough to jump his leg and spin-kick him back.

He flips himself away then rushes at her, hands curled into fists, and it’s a real, honest-to-god fight, pure adrenaline and exhilaration, muscles sliding against muscles and her skin tingling with the thrill of it all. Her arms are bare and his aren’t, but still when her forearm presses against the black leather of his chest, she feels the same rush as she would when taking lovers to her bed in Sakaar, the shivering heat and pleasure of touch.

What that means, she doesn’t dare dwell on, instead throwing herself into the fight with abandon. She was right to make it hand-to-hand combat instead of weapons; Loki is skilled with daggers, as is she with her blade, but it doesn’t compare to the unmitigated fire of knocking arms and legs in the race to fell the other, the way their limbs lock and unlock, the bruises that bloom and heal just as quickly as they appear on both their bodies.

He is better this time—perhaps because he’s actually trying to fight and not just get under her skin and steal her secrets—but she has several centuries of experience on him. Had they been human, the fight might have taken an hour, but she is not drunk enough to let herself be beaten by a trickster prince. She catches and knocks away his arms before he can hit her and thrusts up her knee, knocking him backwards and into the wall, where he manages to stay upright even with her arm to his throat and her knee at his stomach.

“I yield,” Loki says, breathing heavy. His chest rises and falls under her touch; he doesn’t seem as displeased by this loss as he had the previous one on Sakaar. “You win.”

“That’s twice you’ve admitted to being bested today alone,” Valkyrie points out, tilting her head but not moving away from him. She can hear his heart beating madly beneath her arm. “Losing your touch?”

His lips twist in a half-smile half-smirk. “I was going to ask you the same thing. I almost thought you’d let me win for a moment there.”

She scoffs. “You wish. I’d never let you win.”

“Not at anything?” he teases, voice purposefully innocent.

Valkyrie stares at him, searching the lines of his face for any trick, any deceit, anything else. His eyes gleam, but she can see the way his gaze flicks down to her lips, can hear the adrenaline still rushing through his pulse, his breath going down in gulps, the feel of his chest shifting underneath her arm.

He’s still so _young_. The prince she’d left behind grown into a man, into a god, but he has nothing on her years, nothing on her time. He thinks he can smirk and swagger his way around with his magic and his wits, can get under her skin and make her explode—and maybe he can, but only if she lets him. She’s not so far beyond her time at Asgard that she doesn’t know how to control an errant prince.

So she looks at him and sees the way he won’t let himself admit he wants her, the way his body reacts to her touch, the flash of his eyes and the curl of his lips. And she drops her arm from his throat, snags her fingers into the neckline of his leather shirt, and yanks him forward.

Loki meets the kiss with a start of surprise, like he hadn’t really expected her to take the bait, and maybe she shouldn’t have—but it doesn’t take him too long to figure it out. His hand comes up, cupping the back of her head, pulling her closer to him so he can deepen the kiss. Her every nerve is on fire, the wine and his touch mingling to create the most glorious, heady sensation deep in her bones.

“Don’t,” she warns the instant he pulls back and looks at her with that smirk he gets when he’s gotten his way.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Loki promises, but his hand slides down from her head, tracing a path along her spine, and her back arches against his touch, so she kind of doubts him.

“Good,” she hisses, tugging him back in towards her lips. “Don’t say anything.”

He obliges and bows his head to kiss her back, then scrapes his teeth gently against her jaw, presses kisses down her neck. She tilts her head up and leans closer, chest to chest, feeling a shivering, heated rush of pleasure as he sucks a quickly-healing bruise onto her collarbone and the sudden stifling of their clothes between them.

“Might I suggest,” he murmurs against the curve of her throat, as she digs her fingers into his buckle, “the bedroom?”

Valkyrie thinks about just taking him here, quick and dirty against the wall, and he does look so good pinned against it, but convenience wins out in the end. She shoves him backwards and he grins as she turns and stalks into his bedroom, trailing after her obediently.

His room is fairly spacious, sparsely decorated, the walls and floor dark and the bed neatly made in green and black. The window is closed, only a dim light from the moon filtering in through the curtains. It’s cold, lacking the warmth of the other room, but the chill does nothing to combat the heat pooling inside her.

Loki lets her push him onto the bed and climb on top of him, not protesting as she undoes his buckles and strips him of his shirt. He does protest when she stops to trace the lines of his bare chest, catching her wrists and dragging her down for a kiss to distract her.

She doesn’t think this is quite what Thor had in mind when he sent her here to babysit his little brother, but she can’t find it in her to complain when Loki is so wickedly good at kissing her and touching her and finding all the right places on her body to press so that she can feel herself begin to unravel—

“Hey,” he breathes when she pauses their kissing to look at him, trying to figure out just how she’d ended up in his bed. A smirk quirks his lips, more practiced than not. “Like what you see?”

“If you don’t hurry up and get me out of my clothes,” she begins, but the threat of her words is lessened by the swipe of her thumb across his jawline and the way her breath catches when he slides a hand up her shirt.

Loki chuckles and doesn’t bother to reply, suiting action to word and all but ripping her shirt off as he drags it up and over her shoulders, tossing it over the bed to where his lies discarded on the floor.

“How’s that?” he asks once he’s completed the task, and runs his fingers up her sides, his touch like a ghost over her bare skin. His smirk is still there, but it’s softened, somehow more genuine, and there’s a touch of awe in his gaze as she lets him trail his hand upwards to curve around one of her breasts, his thumb pressing hot over the fabric there.

“Better.” Valkyrie shifts around, digging her hands into the blankets at either side of his waist, and her hips roll against his, their leather-covered legs sliding against each other. “You’re not done yet.”

Loki kisses her, hot and hungry and wild, and drags his hands down her body until they reach her tights and pushes down. She kicks them off once he gets them halfway down, then gets distracted by the look on his face, half surprised she’s let him do this and half full of desire, so that he manages to get one arm around her waist and flip them over, pinning her to the bed.

“Thought you liked it the other way,” she breathes, wriggling beneath him, although she doesn’t try to get out. His body heat is deliciously warm over her, and her skin burns everywhere he touches her.

“I do,” Loki admits, grinning roguishly. “But I had another idea.”

Before she can ask what this other idea is, he’s slid one hand up between her thighs, stroking the soft skin on the inside, and a breathless gasp falls out of her despite her doing her best to moderate her reactions. But he’d caught her by surprise, in a way he had never managed in sparring, and there’s a wicked smirk on his face as he bows his head to kiss her while his thumb presses hot at the apex of her thighs.

“Fuck,” she whispers, back arching up off the bed. Loki slips his hand around her underwear, practically ripping it in his haste to take it off, and strokes her again, just over the top. Her thighs tremble with the force of pleasure; she barely notices when his lips leave hers and he hooks one leg around his shoulder, then the other.

“Are you—” Valkyrie can’t finish the sentence because he presses a kiss just below her breasts, then trails his lips down, leaving fire where they touch. She hadn’t expected this, had figured he’d want to go the easy way, the quickest way to pleasure and then leave, but instead, he steadies his hands on her hips and ducks his head down low.

His lips hovering just above the curls of dark hair at the top of her thighs, Loki looks up at her and she can see, even in the dim light, how his eyes are dark and blown wide with desire, the sweat on his forehead, his lips kissed pink and almost swollen. His lashes flutter as he looks at her, studying her, and though she’s not quite naked, she’s never felt so bare.

“If you want me to stop, just say so,” he says with a teasing lilt to his voice that proves he knows exactly how much she _doesn’t_ want him to stop.

“Shut up,” she mutters, and tangles one hand in his dark hair, feeling with some satisfaction the way he jolts up into her touch before she shoves his head down. “And stop dawdling. It’s not a good look on you.”

She can’t see his smirk, but she knows it’s there, at least before his lips find their target and she loses all her words in a moan. The back of her throat tingles, all the noises she’d clamped down on before struggling to burst out, now that she’s lost her inhibitions at his touch. Loki swirls his tongue around her clit and then latches on and sucks, sliding one finger inside her, then two, then twisting—

She cries out, unable to help herself, her whole body shaking under him. Her legs tremble where they’re draped over his shoulders; her ankles cross and her feet dig into his bare back, sure to leave bruises for at least a few moments. She curls one hand tightly in the blanket and the other in his hair, holding on as her spine shivers and colors start exploding behind her eyelids.

He’s surprisingly patient as the orgasm rolls through her, withdrawing his fingers and peppering kisses all over, stroking her lightly as she comes down from the high. His lips are trailing up her navel when she can see again, and she slowly unwinds her fingers from his hair, noting distantly that she’d probably tugged too hard.

He doesn’t seem too worse for wear, though, smirking at her as he lifts his head up. She hadn’t wanted to let him get so unbearably smug about this, but she supposes he’d earned it.

“Come here,” Valkyrie murmurs, feeling a little too floaty to do anything except motion for him to come up and kiss her. He obliges her, letting her legs down before crawling up her body to do just that, his mouth still hungry and wanting.

She can feel the press of his arousal against her thighs still. “Take off your pants,” she orders him, and though there’s no threat behind her voice, Loki does it anyway. His eyes are still so dark a green that it makes her breathless when he looks at her, desire and possessiveness and longing all flickering across his gaze one by one.

“Better?” he asks, voice soft and almost teasing, but she shuts him up by reaching down between their bodies and curling a hand around his erection. Loki gasps, lurches, and nearly falls on top of her, stopped only by his arms braced on the bed.

He’s hard in her hands, and it feels a little like controlling him, the way she can squeeze gently and watch the color rise in his cheeks and his whole body startle, or how he whimpers when she swipes a thumb over the head and brings it up to lick the sticky white liquid off her finger. His eyes flutter shut, and she lifts her free hand to cup his cheek, watching as he leans into the touch.

“Hey, look at me,” Valkyrie breathes, tracing the curve of his cheekbone, and carefully shifts underneath him so they’re both positioned right, him on top of her. He hesitates before opening his eyes, and she nearly forgets how to breathe at the sight of what she sees in his dark green gaze, the deep and terrible desire, the wanting that reignites the fire in her belly.

She thinks of the fight, of how he had looked at her this same way when she’d bested him, and smiles.

Loki murmurs a string of curse words, half in a language she doesn’t recognize, as she squeezes him gently again, then drops his head against hers, foreheads pressing together, and whispers, “Please.”

She might make him beg more, but the heat is getting to her too, so she guides him down into her and lets him enter her slowly and fully, gasping from the weight of him. He kisses her desperately, his hands clenched in the bedsheets and hers trailing up his chest and around his shoulders, pulling him in close until there is no point at which they are not touching.

His hips rock against hers. It’s not quite as intense as her first orgasm, when he’d been focused entirely on her, but she can feel the shivers starting in her spine when he comes first. He moans, low and hoarse in his throat, and buries his head in her shoulder as he does.

She drags her nails down his back, cutting into the skin, and waits for him to finish. When he does, he reaches one hand down, finds her center, and presses two fingers to her clit, flicking and then rubbing hard.

“Again,” she commands, voice half-lost in a breathless cry. Loki obeys, and her hips buck up, a hiss escaping through her teeth, as she comes again, the pressure of him inside her and his touch on her too much to take.

When she comes back to herself, he’s got one hand braced on the bed and the other shakingly brushing her sweat-damp hair out of her face, his fingers skittering over her cheek.

“That was,” she tries to say, but loses the words partway through. Her chest is heaving, as is his, and he smirks as he pulls himself carefully out of her and rolls over onto his side.

“Incredible?” he suggests, but the self-satisfaction in his voice is offset by how tender his touch is on her face. “Mind-blowing? The best sex you’ve ever—”

“Shut up,” Valkyrie says, without any heat to it. He grins at her and she leans over, her breasts pressing into his chest in a way that makes him gulp, and kisses him again. “You don’t always have to be so arrogant, you know.”

Loki smiles at her, trailing a hand down her side and curling it around her hip. “Ah, but would you like me if I wasn’t?”

“Who said anything about liking you?”

He tugs on a loose strand of her hair and smirks. “No one,” he allows. “But—”

Whatever he was about to say, she steals from him in a kiss, and he laughs into it but lets her do it anyway, so she thinks it can’t really have been all that important in the first place.

 

 

 

She wonders if Thor can tell, when she meets up with him in her apartment the next day wearing last night’s clothes, her shirt ripped slightly along the edge and smelling too much like _Loki_ , but he only gives her a once-over before asking, “He didn’t give you any trouble, did he?”

Valkyrie thinks of the argument, and the fight, and the night spent together and tells him, truthfully, “Only as much as Loki ever does.”

Thor accepts that answer with a nod and turns to leave, and she thinks that’s the end of it, but then he pauses with his hand on the doorknob.

“By the way, could you do me a favor?”

She crosses her arms and levels him her best unimpressed look. “Another one?”

“Yeah.” Thor glances back at her and grins, earnest as ever. “Don’t break his heart.”

Valkyrie gapes at him, about to splutter something along the lines of, _it’s not like that_ and _how did you know_ and _like anyone could break his heart_ —but Thor swings the door open and steps outside, humming a song she doesn’t recognize as he goes.

“You’re both insufferable!” she calls after him, and Thor chuckles before the door closes on his back, leaving her standing there, wondering why the god of thunder would ask a favor like that of _her_.

Maybe it was worth another visit to Loki to figure it out.


End file.
